[ba-unrev-talk] Putting US purchasing power to good use
http://www.cptech.org/at/ms/omb4jun02ms.html (01)
From slashdot.org
"Today Ralph Nader and I wrote U.S. Office of Management and Budget
Director Mitch Daniels to ask the federal government to use its power as a
big consumer to address competition issues in the market for PC client
software. These are some of the practices we want OMB to examine: OMB is
asked to provide information on federal expenditures for Microsoft
products, determine if a software "monoculture" makes the federal
government more vulnerable to computer viruses or unauthorized access to
federal computers, and to consider a number of strategies to use the US
government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft
behave; OMB is asked to consider if Microsoft should be required (as a
matter of procurement policy) to fully disclose the file formats of its
office productivity and multimedia programs, so that the data created in
such programs could be reliably read by non-Microsoft software; OMB is
asked to consider if it should place a cap of the market share for any one
vendor of PC client software, and have the size of the cap depend upon
Microsoft's willingness to open up its interface information, or port its
MS Office products to additional platforms; OMB is also asked to consider
if it would be more efficient to buy code for office productivity products
(and release into the public domain), rather than spend billions to lease
software." (02)